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1 March 2017

Visiting Conrad's Grave - Canterbury

“Sleepe
after toyle, port after stormie seas,

Ease
after warre, death after life does greatly please.”

-Spenser, ‘The Fairie Queene’ (1590)

Joseph Conrad was laid to rest in
Canterbury Cemetery on August 7th 1924. This is the epitaph on his
tombstone. I’d wanted to visit Conrad’s grave ever since I’d first learned he
was buried in Canterbury when reading Jocelyn Baines’s (1960) doorstopper of a
biography of the famous writer a long time ago. At the start of the summer last
year I finally made that pilgrimage, of sorts. It was only my second trip to
Canterbury. My first trip there had been made some sixteen years or so before,
for a friend’s wedding. At the time I had thought about trying to find Conrad’s resting
place, but back then I didn’t know where Canterbury Cemetery was, and in
the end there wasn’t enough time to combine the two ventures – or so I thought at the
time, for now oddly enough, having done a little research, I found the cemetery
was in fact only a stone’s throw from the house where I’d stayed for the
wedding!

My sister had introduced me to
Conrad’s novels when I was a teenager. The book she’d first recommended – Under Western Eyes – is perhaps my
favourite (and suitably impressed me enough to inspire a mad dash of an
adventure of my own whilst passing through Geneva in the summer of 2014, see
here), but it wasn’t the first of his novels that I read. Instead, I rather
logically began at the beginning with Almayer’s
Folly, the first of his published works; and then I followed this up by reading
his second, An Outcast of the Islands, which
– I only then discovered – is actually a prequel to the events narrated in Almayer’s Folly. Looking back though, I
think the real reason I began with these works was probably their setting. At
the time my mind had been set alight with a desperate wanderlust for Southeast
Asia, inspired by a series of documentary films on television about travelling
to the more remote parts Indonesia – Lawrence and Lorne Blair’s fantastic Ring of Fire(1988).

I’d found my first Conrad book in a
wonderful old secondhand bookshop in Bedford, which has sadly long since
disappeared; but that small pocket-sized 1920s edition of Almayer’s Folly, with its red board covers, set me the challenge to
try to collect as many of Conrad’s works in those particular editions as I
could – I now have a pleasing handful, but the challenge still remains an
on-going quest …

As a confirmed Conraddict,
enthralled by the overblown and grandiose prose of his novels, which to my
mind’s eye are like monumental canvases densely painted with words, when first reading Lord Jim I was so engrossed in its pacy final pages that I overrode my stop on the Tube by about four or five stations before I'd even noticed!

The life and times of Conrad
himself are just as intriguing as his novels. Along with Baines’s I’ve read several
other biographies of Conrad; most recently John Stape’s excellent The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad(2007),
in which I discovered he was friends with the poet, Edward Thomas, and with Edmund
Candler, the Daily Mail journalist
who was ‘embedded’ in Francis Younghusband’s 1904 military expedition to Tibet (see next month's Waymarks blog post).

Born on December 3rd 1857 to
patriotic Polish parents living in enforced exile in what was then part of
the Russian Empire, now the Ukraine, Conrad first ‘ran away’ to sea at a young
age, but then subsequently forged a career which furnished much of his novels
with a nautical setting; he later briefly reached the rank of captain in the
British merchant marine, before retiring and becoming a naturalised British
subject. The honorary Englishman who went on to join the pantheon of English
letters, as the memoirs of Conrad’s wife, Jessie, Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him(1926), and of his eldest son, Borys,
perhaps might most closely relate. It was no small bibliophile’s thrill which I
felt when first finding my copy of Borys Conrad’s My Father Joseph Conrad(1970) on the shelves of one of the famous
secondhand bookshops in Hay-on-Wye, I opened it to find it was signed on the
title page by Bory’s himself.

One of the most
interesting books I’ve read relating to Conrad is Gavin Young’s In Search of Conrad(1991), given to me
by a close friend and fellow Conrad fan, it is part modern day travelogue and
part history book which embarks upon an evocative journey to track down the
ghosts of the people and places which Conrad once knew. It’s a real gem for any
Conrad fan, and a joy to read. But the most recent book I’ve read which is
connected to Conrad is possibly also the most intriguing. Given to me last
Christmas appropriately enough by my sister, it is in fact a novel.

David Miller’s Today (2011) is described as “a quietly elegiac novel” about death
and bereavement. The death is that of Conrad himself who forms an off-stage
character in a story which imagines what that event might have been like for
those closest to the great man. It focuses on Conrad’s secretary, Lilian M. Hallowes,
who was in many instances first witness to the laying down of those deeply
ponderous words which infused his short stories and novels; and his two sons,
Borys and John, as well as his close friend, Richard Curle.

Today
is a taut, slim tome which (oddly contradictory though it might sound to
say so) evocatively brings this funereal episode to life. Having visited
Canterbury in the summer I could picture the locations Miller describes all the
more clearly as they perhaps once were in an era now vastly removed from our own
present day. It’s a curious thing to attempt to imagine the inner lives of real
people, turning them into fictional alter-egos and elucidating possible realities
which now, none of these people, as once living souls, can either confirm or
refute. But then, how much more removed is this than the abstract fictions
which Conrad dreamt up himself to elucidate the dilemmas and inconsistencies of
the human soul and psyche? … In the end all that any of us have to rely upon is
our own imaginations and the certainty of our own minds. We paint the picture
of the world which is most understandable, if not necessarily the most
agreeable, to ourselves; and it is a rare thing if other people choose to share
our particular vision, and relate to us quite so intimately. But this is a rare
gift which Conrad and Miller seem to share.

5 comments:

Interesting! I've done the cliched thing and read Heart of Darkness which is one of my favourite books and, thinking about it, I don't quite understand why I never read more of his books! Would Under Western Eyes be the next one to read?

Hmm, tricky one ... 'Under Western Eyes' is not typical Conrad (seeing as it's set in Switzerland rather than the S.E. Asia, and doesn't feature any ships!), but it's a good read. 'The Secret Agent' is very good too, likewise no boats, and not set in the tropics either - but how can you resist anarchists trying to blow up Greenwich Observatory as a symbolic act against the social construct of regulated time and rational thinking?!

I reckon 'Lord Jim' and 'Victory' are my favs out of his most typical, tropical seafaring novels. I guess, those would be my top four recommends, but best read the blurbs and see what tickles you fancy most.

Be sure to let me know what you make of any other Conrad works you read, Alex - I would love to hear your thoughts on him!

Interesting! I loved just round the corner from that cemetery on Westgate Court Avenue-on Whitstable Road for 6 years and visited Conrad's grave often. I found it strange and amazing and intriguing that he was buried in Canterbury. I hope to reread some of Conrad's expansive works. I lived in Canterbury 1970-1983. I recall that grave and the graves of histwo sons as well. No one I knew had any knowledge about the whole topic and I was very shocked that all my friends, married to university lecturers, seemed to discount Conrad and his works and his interesting life.They had no interest in his grave or his writings or life! I felt it as sad. I am planning to read "Victory".

It's true Conrad was very much out of literary vogue for quite a while, but he's definitely being reassessed now. There's a lot more depth to his works than initially meets the eye, and likewise his use of language and literary style, even though he can be quite clunky at times - but more often than not that's the real charm though; and the fact he's writing in his third language certainly deserves a great deal of credit, in my opinion. I'd have loved to have met him in person!